The Interracial Sublime: Gender and Race in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya

Abstract

This essay argues that Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya (1806) presents an interracial sublime in the form of the dissolution of the European home/family. Dacre, I suggest, traces this dissolution to the European woman’s assertion of agency by stepping outside spatial, familial, racial and sexual boundaries. In the first section it examines the crisis of European domesticity where the family and the parent/s fail in their responsibilities toward the children. In section two I suggest that within the dissolving home/family we see the European woman, Victoria, subverting further the dissolution. The arrival of the Moor within the house compounds the blurring of hierarchies and ordering. In the final section I trace the features of the interracial sublime. I conclude by proposing that Dacre’s interracial sublime serves the purpose of demonstrating the permeability of European borders - a permeability that wreaks disaster. Dacre’s tale therefore ultimately functions as a caution against the woman’s emancipated and agential actions.